Locals call rally for racial unity

A makeshift memorial of flowers and a photo of victim Heather Heyer sits in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 13. Heyer died when a car rammed into a group of people who were protesting the presence of white supremacists who had gathered in the city for a rally.(Photo: Steve Helber, AP)

A group of St. George residents called for a rally promoting racial unity on Monday, joining a slew of others organized across Utah and much of the country in the wake of a violent weekend during a white nationalist demonstration in Virginia.

One woman was killed and dozens of others injured Saturday when a car drove into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis, members of the Klux Klan and other white supremacists had gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Since then groups in communities across the country have been organizing their own local demonstrations, mostly to denounce racism and the white supremacist groups.

“This is essential that we have these discussions locally, in our local communities,” said Ben Halpern, 24, a St. George resident who said he planned to attend the St. George event and remain active on social media.

The St. George rally, organized loosely on a Meetup.com web page, was scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Town Square in the central part of the city, near the intersection of Main Street and Tabernacle.

Julia Conaway Bondanella, 74, who retired as a professor at Indiana University before moving to St. George 10 years ago, said she planned to attend to help show a united front against racially-motivated hatred.

Charlottesville served as a painful reminder, she said, recalling some of her experiences during the civil rights movements of the 1960s, but noting that the current state of racial affairs across the U.S. in some ways feels more ominous.

In Salt Lake City, the Utah Republican Party and Salt Lake County Republican Party scheduled a rally outside the state Capitol, with Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox and U.S. Rep. Mia Love listed in announcements for the event as among the prominent scheduled speakers.

Cox took to Twitter on Sunday to say he agreed to speak at the event before knowing it was sponsored by the GOP, noting that he considered the issue nonpartisan.

“I believe there are nuances/false choices/multiple sides to almost every issue...but radical white supremacy isn’t one of them!” he tweeted.

Love, a Republican who became the first black female member of the GOP in Congress when she was elected in 2014, said, called the violence in Charlottesville “repulsive.”

“This is not who we are as a nation,” she tweeted on Saturday. “We must be united against this bigotry.”

President Donald Trump, who came under fire over the weekend for initially blaming the violence on people “on many sides,” gave a speech Monday condemning white supremacist groups and declaring that “racism is evil.”

The father of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed by the vehicle in Charlottesville, said Monday he was proud of his daughter to joining the counter-protesters in Charlottesville.

Twenty-year-old James Alex Fields, Jr., of Ohio, is accused of ramming his car into other vehicles where Heyer and a crowd of others were walking along a narrow street away from the rally. He was denied bond on Monday on charges that included second-degree murder, several counts of malicious wounding and one count of hit-and-run.